The room was inundated in a devastating hiss, like the shriek of an injured dragon. Casimir's hands were knocked aside by the fabulously high pressure of the escaping oxygen. Papers blizzarded and piano keys skittered across the floor. Ignoring it, Bert Nix stuffed Kleenex into Sharon's ears, then into his own. In a minute Sharon began to breathe easier. At the same time his pipe-ashes burst into a small bonfire, ignited by the high oxygen levels. Casimir was making ready to stomp it out when Virgil pushed him gently aside; he had been wise enough to yank a fire extinguisher from the wall on their way up. Once the fire was smothered, Virgil commenced what first aid was possible on Sharon. Casimir returned to the Burrows and, finding an elevator, brought up more oxygen and a regulator. Using a garbage bag they were able to rig a crude oxygen tent.
The ambulance crew arrived in an hour. The technicians loaded Sharon up and wheeled him away, Bert Nix advising them on Sharon's favorite foods.
I passed this procession on my way thereCasimir had called to give me the news. When I arrived in the doorway of Sharon's office, I beheld an unforgettable scene: Virgil and Casimir knee-deep in wreckage; a desk littered with the torn-open wrappers of medical supplies; Virgil holding up a sheaf of charred, bloodstained, fire-extinguisher-caked forms; and Casimir laughing loudly beneath the opened sky.
At the front of the auditorium, Professor Embers spoke. He never lectured; he spoke. In the middle of the auditorium his audience of five hundred sat back in their seats, staring up openmouthed into the image of the Professor on the nearest color TV monitor. In the back of the auditorium, Sarah sat in twilight, trying to balance the Student Government budget.
"So grammar is just the mode in which we image concepts," the professor was saying. "Grammar is like the walls and bumpers of a pinball machine. Rhetoric is like the flippers of a pinball machine. You control the flippers. The rest of the machinegrammar controls everything else. If you use the flippers well, you make points. If you fail to image your concepts viably, your ball drops into the black hole of nothingness. If you try to cheat, the machine tilts and you lose that's like people not understanding your interactions. That's why we have to learn Grammar here in Freshman. That, and because S. S. Krupp says we have to."
There was a pause of several seconds, and then a hundred or so people laughed. Sarah did not. Unlike the freshmen in the class, who thought Professor Embers was a cool guy, Sarah thought he was a bore and a turkey. He continued to speak, and she continued to balance.
This was the budget for this semester, and it was supposed to have been done last semester. But last semester the records had been gulped by a mysterious computer error, and now Sarah had to reconstruct them so that the government could resume debate. She had some help from me in this, though I don't know how much good it did. We had met early in the year, at a reception for faculty-in-residence, arid later had a lunch or two together and talked about American Megaversity. If nothing else, my suite was a quiet and pleasant enough place where she could spread her papers out and work uninterrupted when she needed to.
She could also work uninterrupted in her Freshman English class, because she was a senior English major with a 3.7 average and didn't need to pay much attention.
Her first inkling that something was wrong had been in midsummer, when the megaversity's computer scheduling system had scheduled her for Freshman English automatically, warning that she had failed to meet this requirement during her first year. "Look," she had said to the relevant official when she arrived in the fall, "I'm an English major. I know this stuff. Why are you putting me in Freshman English?"
The General Curriculum Advisor consulted little codes printed by the computer, and looked them up in a huge computer-printed book. "Ah," he said, "was one of your parents a foreign national?" "My stepmother is from Wales."
"That explains it. You see." The official had swung around toward her and assumed a frank, open body-language posture. "Statistical analysis shows that children of one or more foreign nationals are often gifted with Special Challenges." Sarah's spine arched back and she set her jaw. "You're saying I can't speak English because my stepmother was Welsh?" "Special Challenges are likely in your case. You were mistakenly exempted from Freshmen English because of your high test scores. This exemption option has now been retroactively waived for your convenience."
"I don't want it waived. It's not convenient."
"To ensure maintenance of high academic standards, the waiver is avolitional."
"Well, that's bullshit." This was not a very effective thing to say. Sarah wished that Hyacinth could come talk for her; Hyacinth would not be polite, Hyacinth would say completely outrageous things and they would scatter in terror. "There's no way I can accept that." Drawn to the noise like scavengers, two young clean-cut advisors looked in the door with open and understanding smiles. Everyone smiled except for Sarah. But she knew she was right this timeshe knew damn well what language was spoken in Wales these days. They could smile stupidly until blue in the face. When the advisor hinted that she was asking for special treatment because she was President, she gave him a look that snapped his composure for a second, a small but helpful triumph.
She had done it by the books, filing a petition requesting to be discharged from Freshman English. But her petition was rejected because of a computer error which made it appear that she had gotten 260 instead of 660 on her SATs. By the time an extra score report from the testing company proved that she was smart after all, it was too late to drop or add classesso, Freshman English it was.
The end of the class approached at last, and Professor Embers handed back this week's essays. The assignment was to select a magazine ad and write about how it made you feel.
"I've been epiphanied by the quality of your essays this week," said Professor Embers. "We hardly had to give out any C's this time around. I have them alphabetized by your first names up here in sixteen stacks, one for each section."
All five hundred students went down at once to get theirs. Sarah worked for ten minutes. then gathered her things and headed for the front, dawdling on purpose. Clustered around the stack of papers for her section she could see five of the Stalinistsfor some reason they had all ended up in her section. Since she never attended section meetings, this was no problem, but she did not want to encounter them at times like this either. Standing there tall and straight as a burned-out sapling in a field was Dexter Fresser, an important figure in the Stalinist Underground Battalion. Most of all, she wanted to avoid him. Sarah and Dex had gone to the same high school in Ohio, ridden the same bus to school, slept in the same bed thirteen times and shared the same LSD on three occasions. Since then, Dex had hardly ever not taken lots of acid. Sarah had taken none. Now he was a weird rattle-minded radical who nevertheless remembered her, and she avoided him scrupulously.
About halfway down the aisle she found a television monitor displaying an image of Dex. She sank deeply into a seat and watched him and his comrades. Dex was reading a paper desultorily and she knew it was hers. He flipped aimlessly through it, as though searching for a particular word or phrase, then shook his head helplessly and dropped it back on the stack. Finally the last of them excavated his paper and they were collectively gone, leaving behind several dozen essays no one had bothered to pick up.
Associate Professor Archibald Embers, Learning Facilitator of Freshman English G Group, was regarding a young woman on his sofa and endeavoring to keep his pipe lit. This required a lot of upside-down work with his butane lighter and he thought the burn on his thumb might be second-degree. This particular woman was definitely confrontational, though, and it was no time to show pain. He held the pipe cautiously and reached out with the other hand to drape his thumb casually over the rim of a potted plant, thrusting the roasted region deeply into the cool humus. I am Antaeus, he thought, and yet I am Prometheus, singed by my own flame. They were sitting in the conversation pit he had installed so as to avoid talking to students across his desk like some kind of authoritarian. Or was it totalitarian? He could never remember the distinction.